Re: "clear the ballot" for the Eggcorn wine list

Ken contributed “tankered” for “tankard” on the older version of the Forum, but I don’t think anyone ever before posted the more obvious tankard>>tanker reshaping, which turns out to be fairly common. And surprisingly, the etymological rule doesn’t seem to apply. The origins of both words are murky, but “tank” may (or may not) be related to languages of the Indian subcontinent perhaps mediated by Portuguese and other languages, and tankard may be a Middle Dutch transposition of Latin cantharus. Both are pretty cool, and I had no idea that tank’s origins were so mysterious.

[In sense 1, perh. immediately from an Indian vernacular: cf. Guz. tankh an underground reservoir for water (Shakespear), tanki a reservoir of water, a small well (Wilson); Marathi tanken, taken, a reservoir of water, a tank (Wilson); tanka a cistern of stone inside a house, etc., a reservoir for rain-water: words which some would connect with Skr. tadaga pond, lake, pool; others think that they are all derived from Pg. tanque pond = Sp. estanque, F. étang: L. stagnum pond, pool, with which at least the Indian words were identified by the Portuguese, who even in the Roteiro de Vasco da Gama and through the 16th c. applied tanque to the Indian reservoirs, called also in Fr. estang (Pyrard de Laval c 1610). The 17th c. Eng. forms tanque and tanke appear to be taken from the Pg.; tanck, tank, on the other hand, with It. tancho (Varthema 1510), may have been from Guz. tankh. As to the Eng. use in senses 1b and 2, it is not clear whether this came from Anglo-Indian usage, or was immediately related to Pg. tanque. It could scarcely arise out of earlier Eng. or Sc. stank ‘pond, fish-pond, stagnant pool, ditch’, since this never in sense approached that of tank.]
[I’ve removed code for macrons to make my life easier.]

I kinda wish David’s “tanker” contribution weren’t buried in this thread—it’s worthy of its own spotlight.